T HE publication of the third and final volume of Ed- ward Nehls' collec- tIon of extracts from memoirs and remi- niscences hy the friends and acquaint- ances of D. H. Lawrence ("D. H. Law- rence: A Composite Biography," put out by the University of Wisconsin Press) completes an interesting experi- ment in biography and has the unusual side effect of providing a full justifica- tion of the work of another biographer. When Professor Harry T. Moore's "The Intelligent Heart," a more con- ventionally planned life of Lawrence, appeared, five years ago, it was jumped on by almost every critic and reviewer as a dismal failure of understandIng- "This can't have been Lawrence; Pro- fessor Moore has got down everything unimportant and has missed every- thing big about the man." As Mr. Nehls' anthology, drawn from the source material on Lawrence, now shows, the reviewers were working from the back to the front, denying the validity of Professor Moore's portrait of the man as he was on the strength of their impression of what he ought to have been, an impression they had ex- trapolated from that part of his work they happened to have liked and ac- cepted. They wanted a life appropriate to the genius that Lawrence was at his best, and they were disconcerted and offended by the mediocrity of the career and of the associations that Professor Moore revealed so paInfully and-in , , \. disturbing, since It brings the biogra- pher face to face with a horrifyingly split personality, a genius of the first rank consumed by a second-rate ambition. Lawrence was rarely content with the creative act that was completed by the production of the work in hand; nearly everything he wrote was a means to an end-the capture of an audience as much interested in him as in his writ- ing. To the reader who has attentively examined the ideas in his essays on Thomas Hardy and on Education, it is evident that Lawrence wrote "The Rainbow" and "Women in Love" not merely to express his own attitudes but to make converts and to create a follow- ing. When the body of his work is re- lated to all the available material about his life, it becomes apparent that this desire to he a master and to have disci- ples was a ruling passion. From the start, what he wrote was less Important to him than the influence he could exert by his writing. He wrote to change his readers' basic attitudes toward life and the universe, because bringing about such a fund.amental change would be the most convincing display of the ex- tent of his influence over them. In hIS letters and in the first-hand accounts of his relationships, he is a compulsive med- dler In other people's affairs. He was a tremendous and shameless gIver of ad- vice, an enthusiast for being the non- playing captain in the emotional situa- tions of his acquaintances, and an eager reorganizer of lives. The world is di- vided into two camps-the group of persons who are to a greater or lesser extent living their own bves, and the less spirited and less interesting band whose lives are determined by their circumstances or by dominating friends and associates. The first group are generally resistant to meddlers, while the num- berless flock in the second are what sheep are for sheepdogs, the predestined material for their voca- tion. As the vice of meddlIng grew on Lawrence, hIs circle of intimate acquaint- ances progressively deteri- orated. Nobody with self- respect or integrity could permIt the fingering of his inner life that was a con- BOOKS "Bertie Backed Slowly A way" proportion to the admiration felt for the genius-humiliatingly. It was clear from the tone of the criticisms and the reviews that the biography was damag- ing to the self-esteem of the people who wrote them. They were not prepared to be caught admiring the mortal Law- rence in public; they wanted the legend- ary Lawrence, the Phoenix, shown ris- ing proudly above life, superior to it and worthy of them. An immense gulf divides the biog- rapher of Lawrence from the average person who is likely to read the biog- raphy and from the average admirer of Lawrence. The admirer has come upon some part of the work of Lawrence at a time when he was emotionally pre- pared to receive it, and under the spell of its vitality and imaginative power he has absorbed into his being what he has read; he has made Lawrence's vision part of his own imaginative processes. The biographer, whose initial interest in Lawrence may have been kindled by the same experience, cannot be con ten t to admire what he admires and to go on from there; to ohtain a perspective he must consider Lawrence's entire body of work, and if he wishes to understand the development of Lawrence's mind he must read everything in the order in which it was written-from the first poems, and the stories he entered for the N ottinghamshire Guardian Christ- mas competition in 1907, through to the review of Eric Gill's "Art-Non- sense and Other Essays," the last thing he was to write before his death, in 1 9 3 o. The result is almost inevitably [DOG EAT DOG J if. . '" , , (J, / 4 ) . . ) .. :2- '. f I - -- j - -- - d f \ '::(\; Y'" ---- 157